The Phenomenology of Pain: An Experience of Life

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to address the polyhedric aspect of pain from a phenomenological perspective, taking as a strating point Husserlian Lebenswelt and Aristotle’s definition of education in Nicomachean Ethics, in which he states that education consists of being educated in pleasure and pain.

Pain must be situated at the core of the history of mankind. Our mere existence necessarily implies pain and pleasure. We will try to show how pain is such an intrinsic part of the world that any attempts to suppress it could lead to the elimination of the world itself.

We are unquestionably a part of the Lebenswelt that sustains us. Indeed, this is the first lesson of life: finding a sense and direction for life and accepting our conditioning and determinations.

A conditioning that can and should be transformed and metamorphosised from three basic and limiting life experiences that will radically alter our public and private ego: illness, love and the experience of art (anthologically emblematized in tragedy). A person in pain is “another being”.

These three experiences share the substratum of pain and inevitable suffering and are capable of transforming our personality. In situations such as these, and, in true phrominos tradition (Aristotle), the most intelligent option is to draw some form of benefit from tragic and heart-rending experiences.

The object is to consider the prehistory and archaeology of pain; the relationship between philosophy and pain; the aesthetic and artistic experience in situations of pain; religion and pain, etc.

The paper concludes with global reflections on pain in an obsessively individualistic and hedonistic society: the futile attempt to rid the world of pain.

Indeed, the consequence of this aspiration is that the pain that inevitably forms an intrinsic part of our existence erupts into our lives as a traumatic and devastating event, due to our inability to understand the educational aspects of pain and its possible transformation into aesthetic pleasure through the experience of art and religion.